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Obama's Impact on Healthcare and Pharma Industry Here's where pharma industry people can discuss the pros and cons of Obama's plans for healthcare in the US and the pharma industry.

The fact that an increasing number of medications are unable to beat sugar pills has thrown the industry into crisis. It's not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It's as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger. Why are inert pills suddenly overwhelming promising new drugs and established medicines alike? Pharma doesn't know, and drugmakers are realizing they need to fully understand the mechanisms behind it so they can design trials that differentiate more clearly between the beneficial effects of their products and the body's innate ability to heal itself. special task force of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health is seeking to stem the crisis by quietly undertaking one of the most ambitious data-sharing efforts in the history of the drug industry.

As of mid-August 2009, there were six (6) lobbyists per single (1) member of House and Senate (Bloomberg News). That's 6:1, folks. Just for healthcare reform. For financial industry reform, there are 2,400 lobbyists in play. The Chamber of Commerce spent $26.2 million--in the first 2 quarters (6 months) of 2009. Clearly, private industries and their foot soldiers on K Street/Capitol Hill influence/dictate American policymaking. No matter who's 'voted in,' it's the influence machine that rules Washington. Worse, there's a good chance that the Supreme Court will grant corporations (as 'fictive persons') to spend unlimited dollars in funding electoral campaigns. Is there hope that this country will be a democracy one day? Or is it doomed to become increasingly, irrevocably plutocratic?

As of mid-August 2009, there were six (6) lobbyists per single (1) member of House and Senate (Bloomberg News). That's 6:1, folks. Just for healthcare reform. For financial industry reform, there are 2,400 lobbyists in play. The Chamber of Commerce spent $26.2 million--in the first 2 quarters (6 months) of 2009.

"Hop up on the table, Honey." mThat's how an x-ray technician addressed my 89-year-old mother-in-law in 2001, when we took her for knee x-rays. Mom, who had advanced osteoporosis and arthritis as well as confusion and heart problems, had long since given up hopping. When it became obvious that she needed assistance, the technician grabbed her arm -- as if pulling on another sore appendage would magically raise the rest of her onto the table. It didn't. This incident has become our personal mantra for expressing what is wrong with America's health care system. Having helped our four parents during their final years and having both had cancer ourselves as well as other medical problems, we have had experiences with five nursing homes, two personal care facilities and a half dozen hospitals. We've lost count of the doctors, drugstores and health insurance plans. All of us have had health insurance, though some policies were better than others. Nonetheless, we have experienced incident after incident demonstrating the waste, ignorance and apathy which is rampant in the system. Unable to list them all, I have been heretofore reluctant to write about a handful of them lest the reader be persuaded that the problem is with only that hospital, only that nursing home or only that doctor. There is, however, an increasing crisis of confusion, mismanagement and ill-preparedness which is at the core of our healthcare system. We are all familiar at least with the trend line if not the specifics for healthcare costs. According to WhiteHouse.gov, "The United States spends over $2.2 trillion on health care each year-almost $8,000 per person." That's sixteen percent of the economy. Healthcare costs are projected to increase to almost twenty percent ($4 trillion a year) by 2017. Meanwhile forty-six million Americans are without health insurance (14,000 more each day), premiums and co-pays are rising and more reasons are used to refuse coverage both to those willing to pay and thos

"Hop up on the table, Honey." mThat's how an x-ray technician addressed my 89-year-old mother-in-law in 2001, when we took her for knee x-rays. Mom, who had advanced osteoporosis and arthritis as well as confusion and heart problems, had long since given up hopping. When it became obvious that she needed assistance, the technician grabbed her arm -- as if pulling on another sore appendage would magically raise the rest of her onto the table. It didn't. This incident has become our personal mantra for expressing what is wrong with America's health care system. Having helped our four parents during their final years and having both had cancer ourselves as well as other medical problems, we have had experiences with five nursing homes, two personal care facilities and a half dozen hospitals. We've lost count of the doctors, drugstores and health insurance plans. All of us have had health insurance, though some policies were better than others. Nonetheless, we have experienced incident after incident demonstrating the waste, ignorance and apathy which is rampant in the system. Unable to list them all, I have been heretofore reluctant to write about a handful of them lest the reader be persuaded that the problem is with only that hospital, only that nursing home or only that doctor. There is, however, an increasing crisis of confusion, mismanagement and ill-preparedness which is at the core of our healthcare system. We are all familiar at least with the trend line if not the specifics for healthcare costs. According to WhiteHouse.gov, "The United States spends over $2.2 trillion on health care each year-almost $8,000 per person." That's sixteen percent of the economy. Healthcare costs are projected to increase to almost twenty percent ($4 trillion a year) by 2017. Meanwhile forty-six million Americans are without health insurance (14,000 more each day), premiums and co-pays are rising and more reasons are used to refuse coverage both to those willing to pay and thos

This is really unbelievable: The drug and medical-device industries are mobilizing to gut a provision in the stimulus bill that would spend $1.1 billion on research comparing medical treatments, portraying it as the first step to government rationing.

"More than three-quarters of healthcare executives believe their industry's most valuable asset is going to be information contained in electronic medical records...hundreds of billions of gigabytes of health and medical information will be industry's most valuable asset in 5 years. The value, however, must be unlocked by finding ways to overcome a lack of standards, privacy concerns, and technology limitations that could hinder use of the data." || NOTE: This data has already been used by private medical insurance companies to dig up "preexisting conditions" that allow them to drop coverage (rescission) on potentially unprofitable subscribers. ||

In every industrialized nation, the movement to reform health care has begun with stories about cruelty. The Canadians had stories like the 1946 Toronto Globe and Mail report of a woman in labor who was refused help by three successive physicians, apparently because of her inability to pay. In Australia, a 1954 letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald sought help for a young woman who had lung disease. She couldn't afford to refill her oxygen tank, and had been forced to ration her intake "to a point where she is on the borderline of death." In Britain, George Bernard Shaw was at a London hospital visiting an eminent physician when an assistant came in to report that a sick man had arrived requesting treatment. "Is he worth it?" the physician asked. It was the normality of the question that shocked Shaw and prompted his scathing and influential 1906 play, "The Doctor's Dilemma." The British health system, he charged, was "a conspiracy to exploit popular credulity and human suffering."

In the world of medicine, "key opinion leader" is the somewhat Orwellian term used to describe the senior doctors who help drug companies sell drugs. : BMJ : British Medical Journal

Blog on Medicare, Medicaid, pharma, biotech, health reform, and more. Insights and resources on hot issues. Authored by a health care strategist, speaker, and writer. Expert on Medicare, Medicaid, and pharma, biotech, and device industries

For medical professionals, health care providers, industry leaders, medical students, professional and non-professional researchers, academic and medical librarians, patients, healthcare consumers, and physicians looking for CMEs and conference recaps.

Workers, 20-30% of whom are uninsured, and an even larger percentage of whom are underinsured, continue to pay the bill for others to get coverage; their payroll taxes help support Medicare for the elderly, Medicaid for the disabled, for children of low-income parents, and those living in poverty.